John Durham Peters

John Durham Peters

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Speaking into the air. A history of the idea of communication

Introduction: the problem of communication

Kommunikasjonsbegrepet / Problematisk. Myten om den perfekte dialogen og fullkomne forståelsen mellom sinn.
Historiesyn / “in every act of historical narration a constructivist principle” (3).
Solipsism and telepathy / Words typical of the late nineteenth century. Reflect an individualist culture. The walls of the mind as impermeable or blissfully thin.
Latin communicare / Impart, share, make common
> how the concept has come to connote idealised conceptions of mutuality, good, sharing.
Meanings / ·  Imparting – to give, to make known
·  Transfer or transmission
·  Exchange. Leading the way to the high-stake definition of communication as contact between interiorities.
·  Term for various modes of symbolic interaction
·  The mechanism through which human relations develop – “all the symbols of the mind, togheter with the means of conveying them through space and preserving the in time” (Cooley in Peters: 9).

Theoretical debates 1920s

/ Visible in philosophy and in social thought.
1.  Communication as the dispersion of persuasive symbols in order ot manage mass opinion (Lippmann, Lasswell). Mass communication. Future of democracy. Communication as the management of mass opinion
2.  Communication as the means to eliminate semantic dissonance. Ogden and Richards. Sharing of consciousness. Fear of solipsism.
3.  Communication as an insurmountable barrier. Always failing to connect. T.S. Eliot, Kafka, Virginia Wolf. Fearing that communication in reality is impossible. Useless sallies from the citadel of the self.
In short / “communication as bridge always means an abyss is somewhere near” (16).
4. Martin Heidegger Being and Time (1927)
The disclosure of otherneess / Not adhering to the notion of communication as mental sharing. Communication is about the constitution of relationshuip, the revelation of otherness. “His notion of communicaiton was neither semantic (meanings exchanged) nor pragmatic (actions coordniated) but world disclosing (otherness opened).
5. John Dewey (1927)
The orchestration of action / Communucation as pragmatic making-do. Eschews a semantic understanding of communication. The universe as more than matter and mind – also about experience/culture: the world that open up between people. Communication as partaking and participating in the creation of a collective world.
Technical and therapeutic discourses after WWII / The development of contrast between mass communication and interpersonal communication in the 1930s.
Information theory (communication theory) / Of the 1940s. Shannon. A theory of signals (not of significance). The discourse of information infiltrates all areas (from neurons to marriages and good managing). Weaver. Schramm. Imperfections of human interchange can be readressed by improved technology.
Communication as therapeutic self-expression / Authentic disclosure. Both in interpersonal and international levels (UN in 1945). Julian Huxley, Gregory Bateson. Carl R. Rogers. Communication as cure and disease.
Peters’ message / The expansion of means does not necessarily lead to the expansion of minds. Orchestrating collective being.

ONE: Dialogue and dissemination

The mistake of blaming the media / for distorting dialogue. Rather media critique should be about matters of power (concentration). Second, the need to avoid technological/media determinism. Media technologies are applied. Their social applications are not inherent in technology.Third, dialogue can be tyrannical, and dissemination can be just.
Dialogue and Eros in the Phaedrus / Socrates’ critique of writing – part of a larger critique. Coupling between person and person, soul and soul. Eros, not transmission. Writing allows strange couplings > worries about erotic perversion.
The connection between the refusal to write and the refusion to penetrate. Both are asymmetrical relations.
Knowing the audience / The rhetorician must fit the tropes and topoi to the listenere. Foolish to scatter words uncritically to the masses. Reciprocal coupling of speaker and hearer.
Critique of writing / Writing creates this kind of scatter. No fit with the audience. Destroys memory.
Resembles later critique of media / Phaedrus spells out clearly the normative basis of the critique of media (which perhaps is why Peters does not bother to deal with all media?).
A critique of promiscuity / rather than of writing per se.
Pretended live presence / but in fact embalmed intelligence.
Dissemination in the Synoptic gospels / Dissemination as desirable.
The parabel of the sower – about the diversity of audience interpretations. Sort of an encoding – decoding model. The audience have the interpretative burden.
The wasteful act / Godlike love/agape is always wasteful and figured like broadcasting.
One-way communication not necessarily bad / And reciprocity may be violent: war and vengeance. What would social life be if nothing but reciprocity governed.
Gift-giving as an illuminating parallel.
Peters’ conclusion?’ / Nothing ethically deficient about broadcasting. Chasms between sender and receiver not always to be bridged – “they are sometimes vistas to be appreciated or distances to be respected.”
Reciprocity is a moral ideal, but it’s insufficient.

TWO: History of an error: the spiritualist tradition

The vision of soul-to-soul converse / 1.  early Christianity
2.  British empiricism (Locke)
3.  spiritualism
> important for our understanding of communication
e.g. Augustine and Locke / The interiority of the self
Sign as a vessel to be filled with content/meaning.
The self as an eternal, self-identical soul. The soul as self-existent and detachable.
Spiritualist tradition / Etheral modes of thought transference. The immediate purity of meaning-minds.
The dream of perfect communication – i.e. shared interiorities/the hassle of imperfect media.
Peters’ the undesirability of soul-to-soul communication / First this model/dream is dangerous – despair at the impossibility of communication (co-operations is available and possible in any case). Un-necessary fair of communication break-down. Respecting disdain for communication/interactions.
Christian sources / The Gospel of John: the characteristically double mixture of breakdown and soulful unity. Dialogue as motivated by misunderstanding in the first place.
The ontological dative / > possible to think of how persons can share spiritual substance.
1. Augustine: the spirit of the letter / Helped build the idea of the interior self and the dream of overcoming it in communication.
A sign / A marker of interior and exterior realities. Words are pointers to things mental and material – their value lies outside them. The sign is only an interpretive help.
The word is split into a body (sound) and spirit (meaning). The word points to external and internal realities. Important for revealing interiors – thought and spirit.

Yet writing ranked below speech?

/ “(…) letters have been invended that we might be able to converse also with the absent; but these are signs of words, as words themselves are signs in our conversations of those things which we think.” Presence as prioritised.
Difficult pages (73-74).

2. Angels: the principle of bodily indifference

/ Angels present a model of communication as it should be. An ideal speech situation. Pure bodies of meaning.
Thomas Aquinas.
Angeology gives the intellectual basis for the dream of shared interiors in communication.

BRITISH EMPIRICISM

/ From matter to mind: “communication in the seventeenth century

Latin communicare

/ with no special reference to sharing thoughts.

Psycho-physical speculations

/ Francis Bacon – “some light effluxions from spirit to spirit.”
Joseph Glanvill on aether vibrations from mind to mind. The fusion of mental and material processes.
John Wilkins: ambitions of speed in long-distance communication.
Newtonian physics and Newton’s description of gravity, and gravity as travelling in medium.

John Locke: private properties of meaning

/ Communication to describe the sharing of ideas between people. Locke’s conceptualisation of communication mingles old senses of the term with innovative ones. Communication not as speech, rhetoric, discourse, but as their ideal end result.

Signs

/ as property. The meanings of words as a sort of private property in the individual’s interior. The subjectification of the world.

The idea “idea”

/ (Descartes). Human understanding based on senses. No direct access to the real world. Ideas as raw materials of all knowledge.
The impossibility to communicate from soul to soul?

Two sorts of discourse

/ The internal stream of ideas deriving form sensation and reflection; the public or external use of language. The inner word is authorative for Locke.

Language as conveys

/ Language is means of transporting ideas. Word as a receptable of meaning, as the body is the receptable of the soul. Communication as a problem of transporting mental cargo.

Communication breakdown

/ looms.
Communication paradoxical concept: freedom to combine words and ideas/ hopes for exact correspondence (which is impossible?).

From private experiences to common world?

/ (the inverse problem of property). How can common meaning come to exist?

Communication

/ Combining an Augustinian semiotic of innter and outer, a political program of individual liberty, and a scientific imagination of clean processes of transmission.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY SPIRITUALISM

/ Agony of solitude and yearning for unity.
Romanticism.

Dr. Mesmer and his fluids

/ Franz Anton Mesmer (1743-1815).
Animal magnetism (latin animus – spirit). Gravitation holds planets in orbit – animal magnetism holds souls in love and health and communication. Magnetized fluids through bodies.
> creating the image of the total fusion of two or more souls. En repport.

Mesmeric control > hypnotism

/ i.e. appears in visions of mass communication. Mesmerism helped shape the understanding of mass media as agents of mass control and persuasion.

Spiritualist mediums and media

/ Mesmerism and telegraphy < electrical connection between individuals.
Spiritualism explicitely modelled itself on the telegraph’s ability to receive remote messages.
Spirit photography.
Ectoplasm

Ether frolics: psychical research

/ Society for Psychical research
> twofold aim of ending the anarchy of popular spiritualism while preserving a properly scientific hold on the supersensual universe.

Ether

/ The universe held together by a transcendent invisible principle of order.

James Clerk Maxwell

/ Anticipates wireless telegraphy. The ether medium.

Ether

/ Survives as a figure of speech although demolished by Einstein’s theory of relativity in 1905,

Radio/telepathy

/ > contact between people via an invisible material linkage – radio waves travelling through “the ether”. The electromagnetic spectrum.

“Brain waves”

/ The propagation of wireless signals and the sharing of thoughts as allied processes.

THE POINT

/ A long string of notions, dispensing with meidation and interpretation, invest the modern notion of communication.
Communication – represent a state of shared understanding and sympathy between people.

THREE: Toward a more robust vision of spirit: Hegel, Marx, and Kierkegaard

Main principles

/ 1.  the irreducibility of embodiment
2.  the doubleness of self
3.  the publicness of meaning

Hegel on recognition

/ Phenomenology.
1.  There is no content separate from form. No message apart from a channel. Spirit does not exist without a body.
2.  Communication is a problem of the object as much as the subject. An sich (ontologically possible) vs. für sich (explicitely).

Communication

/ Not about moving mind stuff, but about establishing the conditions for subjects to exist für sich – recognition of self-conscious individuals. There is no self without an other. “Self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness.” – Is this something I can use also when discussing relations of self-identity and others?

Spirit

/ Geist. The experience of the simultaneous diversity and unity of self-consciousnesses. I = We. “human nature only really exists in an achieved community [Gemeinsamkeit] of consciousness,”

Subjectivity and self

/ One’s subjectivity is in sich when it has not yet been recognized by an other. Recognition > subjectivity für sich. The self has thus no priviliged access to itself.

Meaning

/ The conception of Geist locates meaning as public rather than private. Geist consists in the material inscriptions of culture and in the embodied community of interpreters.
The objectivity of meaning > meanings are in things independent of people interpreting them > an account of communication apt for the modern media age. Typically expressions of the human spirit separated in time and space from the bodies of the producers of meaning.

Marx (versus Locke) on money

/ > the basis for much of the deep structure of modern media analysis. Marx criticizes disseminative media. Money as a medium of exchange and a medium of representation.

Locke

/ Nature as an idyll of reciprocity. Welcomes dissemination. Money collected without any harm to one’s neighbourgs.

Dispute between Locke and Marx

/ Whether the original dyad of subject and object remains the normative model or replaced by something more extended and plural?
Money turns dialogue into dissemination.

Money as mass communication

/ Marx prefers dialogue, just communication between equal subjects. Money distorts the normative human relationship of person to person. Reciprocality – just exchange.
Dissemination – broadcasting is wasteful.

Dialogic relations

/ The substance of our communication practices as the orchestration of our social worlds and as a criterion of the good society.
Failures of communication owe less to semantic mismatches than to unjust allocations of symbolic and material resources.

Peters however

/ “The Marxist tradition risks writing off dissemination based on its one-way transmission alone, instead of acknowledging the varying relations of justice that might inform it.” (127).

Kierkegaard’s incognitos

/ The individual is incommensurable with reality.

Communication

/ Meddelelse as a per se philosophical problem. Communication is less a matter of better understanding than of strategic misunderstanding. As revealing and conceiling, not as information exchange. Never transmission of pure thought.

Medium and message

/ The utterance is tied to the ethos of its speaker.
“A sign is something different from what it immediately is.”
The impossibility of direct communication.

Misunderstandings

/ Inevitable in several situations. “In a world of paradoxes, easy communication is necessary false.” Communication does not necessarily improve relations or clarify the underlying reasons of things.

FOUR: Phantasms of the living, dialogues with the dead

Recording and transmission

/ Media technologies conquer the obstacles of distance and death. Tele- and –graphy. Space-binding media and time-binding media (Innis).

Telegraph fits into the lineage of Augustine

/ and the angels and Mesmer: communication without embodiement, contact achieved by the sharing of spiritual (eletrical) fluids.

Parallel universe

/ The separation of transportation from communication > conjuring of a parallel universe, universe of replicas.

“Phantasms of the living”